


Their Other Daughter

by Poppedthep



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen, Jack is Nadia's father, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 19:26:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17607485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poppedthep/pseuds/Poppedthep
Summary: AU - What if Nadia was Jack's?





	Their Other Daughter

An envelope containing three photographs. 

Jack stares at them, his morning orange juice forgotten. Sydney is saying something about school but he can’t hear her over the buzzing in his ears.

Three photographs of a baby girl. Dark hair, inquisitive eyes like Sydney’s. Also like Sydney - his unmistakable ears. 

Written on the reverse of one picture in handwriting he would recognise anywhere, a name: 

Nadia Bristow. 

And a date: June 8, 1982. 

He supposes it must be the baby’s birth date. If it was the date the photographs were taken she’d waited a long time to send them. 

She’s there in one picture, holding the baby, smiling at it like she’d looked at Sydney. His wife. 

They told him she was KGB. They had not told him she was still alive. After the initial shock passes it makes immediate sense. Of course, it was her extraction. Of course a highly trained agent, the brilliant woman he (thought he) knew wouldn’t have been killed by a car accident.

The baby is another shock all together. It could be another lie. Some kind of bait or trap. But why? What else could be gained from further engaging him? Why risk sending them if not because she wanted him to know? 

She obviously expects him to take some action. But what does she expect him to do? She knows him well. How to provoke him, what he cares about. He doesn't want to play into whatever she is setting up. He doesn't want to be predictable to her. 

He is reluctant to think she is contacting him out of any positive motivation purely because of the strength with which he wants to believe that she is. Knowing she is alive the overwhelming bitterness and pain that his wife left with no further regard for him because their marriage was a lie drowns him anew. That believing she wants to establish contact for any reason comforts his broken heart and appeases his bruised ego even slightly puts him on high alert. 

The timing is technically possible. The baby could be his and hers, like the daughter who is sitting next to him. Or it could not. Warring in Jack’s gut are the dual instincts to never trust a word she says again and to go find his other daughter. 

He has another daughter. 

Even as he works to convince himself she can’t possibly be his, his mind is already coming up with a plan to find her. There is a PO Box listed as the return address on the envelope. 

So she means for him to contact her.

Sydney pushes back her chair and stands, ready for school. 

Jack will not write to her. He folds a blank piece of paper into an envelope and writes out the PO Box address. He wonders how long it will take to trace the location of the PO Box, what disguise he’ll have to adopt to stake out the building and follow the letter, how he’ll have to time it to beat the letter there.

\---

She knows sending the photos is a mistake, a foolish, emotional act, but she can’t help it. Knowing how he feels about Sydney, she knows he would want to know.

For all that she’s done to him without wanting to, for all that she’s had to hurt him as a consequence of her work, she can give him that. Things are on her terms now. She’s free.

Besides, what kind of agent can she be while taking care of a child? She would have had to tell him eventually, when Nadia was weaned and older. She can have a nice life in America, with her sister and her father. A normal family life Irina could never give her. It will break her heart when the time comes but she can do it. She’s broken it already leaving two of them, she can leave a third. 

It would be a waste of working so hard to break out of Kashmir before Nadia was born to keep the child with her. (And of course she had to break out before Nadia was born – Jack would never have forgiven her if she’d let them take his daughter). 

The life she leads, the life she must lead, is no place for something so fragile and needy. Nadia needs to be somewhere she’ll be protected. Irina cannot be an agent and a mother. And she has already made her choice between the two. Or it’s been made for her. Either way, it’s in progress now, too late to choose a different path. 

But she can give Nadia her father. A loving parent and a sister. A good life. Protection. And she could never keep Jack’s child from him. 

She strokes Nadia’s hair from her face and wonders what he’ll think of the photographs. How angry he is at her. If he’ll respond. She didn’t dare risk revealing her location but left a PO Box address so he could respond if he felt the need to. If he doesn’t she’ll take Nadia to him anyway when she’s old enough. If he does, so much the better. She’s sure he has plenty to get off his chest to her, questions to ask her. Better to do that now than when the girls are older.

\---

From the bushes he watches the postman deliver his letter to apartment 22 in the Taipei tower block. The late morning air is moist, hot and heavy and sweat makes his shirt cling to his back. 

A woman who is dark haired and beautiful but not his wife answers the door. She looks not unlike her, but is not the same woman. He can’t have got the wrong building, can he? The woman looks at him expectantly and says nothing.

“I’m looking for Irina Derevko,” he says, eventually, because why not at this point.

“How do you know that name?” she answers in lightly accented English, eyes narrowing and hardening.

He meets her stare and says, “I’m her husband.”

She raises an eyebrow and says, “Wait here.”

The door closes in his face. He thinks he hears a baby’s cry from inside but he could be imagining it. The hallway is not air-conditioned. Sweat trickles down his back. 

“…it’s an American. He says he’s your husband…” he hears faintly through the wall. His heart pounds at the low murmur he hears in response, though it’s impossible to tell anything about the voice from here.

The door opens again. The same woman is back and looks almost amused now. 

“What did you get her for your sixth wedding anniversary?” she asks. 

The sixth? Had that been the trip to Oregon? No, that was their fifth. “Tolstoy,” he answers, “Anna Karenina, a first edition.”

He watches the woman relay his answer over her shoulder. Then she opens the door to let him in. 

He steps into a tidily furnished living room and looks around. There is a sense of familiarity in the decor even though he has never been here. The small room opens straight through to a kitchen. Standing in the kitchen in a black silk robe, holding a dark haired baby to her breast, is his wife. Her hair is slightly shorter, spilling messily over her shoulders, and she’s caught a slight tan, but other than that she looks exactly as she did the day before she disappeared. Her eyes burn into him from across the room and she smiles, slow and enigmatic, as she says, “Hello, Jack,” and he chokes on the dual impulses to leap across the room and either strike her or clutch her to him.

Instead he stands there, mute. It is cooler in here and the sweat on his back starts to dry uncomfortably. 

“Would you like to meet her?” she asks and before he’s ready she’s moved in close to him. He can smell her skin, how she smells in the morning when she’s not long woken up, and feel her presence in the air next to him and it’s achingly familiar and awful at the same time. Then she’s handing him the baby and it's tiny and heavy and warm in the crook of his arm and he cradles it gently, looking down and falling in love against his will like he hasn’t since he held their other daughter. 

He had planned to be stoic about the child until he had chance to get a paternity test. He’ll still do the test but he feels a sense of rightness looking at her. It might well be the ears or just an intangible something that tells him she’s his. Even from this distance he can tell that her faint smell is similar to Sydney's. 

He glances up and Derevko is smiling softly, drinking in the sight like a woman starved. It’s unnerving, seeing her look at him like that, when she was so recently his wife, and knowing what he knows now. The last time he saw her face was on the tape they played him where she declared him a fool. He’d almost prefer the predatory smile from earlier.

“Would you like some tea?” the other woman interrupts.

“Jack, this is my sister, Katya. Katya, this is Jack,” Derevko introduces, lingering over the weight of his name. She is slow and deliberate, her voice deeper and surer than how she was as Laura. Derevko is the way Laura got when she’d had a few glasses of wine and was feeling mischievous. It’s highly unnerving. 

“Hello Jack,” Katya says over her shoulder, an eerie echo of her sister, completely beautiful and intimidating in her own way. Only the small relief that she’s not his wife makes it slightly easier to talk to her.

Jack accepts the tea. The baby shifts in his arms, making a little noise. 

“How’s Sydney?” his wife asks. And he feels his heart break a little all over again. He looks up and she is staring down at the baby, not meeting his eye.

“She misses her mother,” he says spitefully. It’s nowhere near enough for what she’s done but he’s gratified to see her flinch.

She swallows. “Her mother misses her too,” she says carefully. 

“Nadia is nothing like Sydney,” she nods to the baby as she talks, “Remember how she’d keep us up at night? Up for feeds at eleven, one, five,” she smiles languidly again and he really needs to get used to this, how she’s even more disarming as Derevko than as Laura. “Nadia’s a very easy baby. Sleeps right through. Even in this heat.”

He’s furious she has the gall to try and reminisce with him about their marriage and at the same time captivated by the warm, low timbre of her voice, familiar and new at the same time – her English relaxed in a way it never was before, a slight accent creeping in. He wants to harden his heart to her, to shout every thing he’s wanted to accuse her of, to hurt her as much as she’s hurt him, and yet he’s drawn in and thrown off guard by the domesticity of it all, standing in a kitchen with his wife, holding their new baby.

By the afternoon Nadia has been put down for her nap and he gets chance to ask everything he wanted. He doesn’t like many of her answers, other than that they’re so unflattering he assumes she must be being honest. Or that’s what she wants him to think.

There’s no shouting. He doesn’t want to wake the baby.

Katya makes dinner, which they eat together. Derevko offers him to stay the night. 

He declines, obviously, but he thinks about it all night, staring at the ceiling of his hotel room. Would they have shared a bed? He thinks she was implying they would. He shouldn’t be so fixated on it. The last time he’d seen her in person they would have shared a bed without question. A lot has been revealed since then but they are fundamentally the same two people who shared beds for over ten years.

She’d implied a lot that afternoon – that she’d as good as loved him and enjoyed their marriage almost as much as he did, among other things. It won’t do him any good to dwell on those things. Even if they are true, doubtless she has a manipulative reason for sharing them, and he will not be caught off guard by her again. She gets you like a slow trickling poison, before you’ve noticed it you’re a gonner, so he must be on his guard if he’s to continue to deal with her. 

It may not be possible to ever get over how much he loved his wife. It may be confusing when he feels that love wanting to attach itself to the woman who was his wife – right there and so wickedly familiar. He’s only human. But even if he can’t help that, he can make sure she can’t use it against him again.

\---

Jack leaves a few days after he arrived, promising to visit again soon. Katya reminds him they will of course move now that he knows their location. He tells her he looks forward to tracking them down again. 

Irina is pleased she told him. Next time he comes she’ll impress upon him the danger Nadia is in, the protection she needs from those that would harm her. Only about a year now before she’s eating independently and ready to go with Jack. He’d wanted to take her, as Irina knew he would, and agreed it would be best to wait until she was weaned, as Irina suspected she could convince him. The foolish romantic in her wonders if any part of him left her there so that they'd have a reason to meet again. 

Perhaps now that they’re talking, and more civilly than she’d dared hope, for now at least, Irina might be able to stay more involved in her daughters’ lives than she thought. She indulges a fantasy where Jack sends her regular updates and invites her to visit for birthdays and special occasions. Thinks about how she’d slip into the US unnoticed to be with them. She’s getting way ahead of herself but if there’s one thing she knows, it’s Jack Bristow, and what he’ll do for the women he loves. She used to be one of them. Maybe she could be again.

For now, she has a whole year to enjoy with her youngest daughter, and the picture Jack left her of Sydney as a Thanksgiving turkey in her school play.

**Author's Note:**

> Found this short AU I wrote all at once while in the Irina/Jack zone a while ago and was pleasantly surprised by it so thought I'd share. There may be some inaccuracies with canon, it's unbetaed. If only I had time to write a long multi-chap on it, I love the idea of this kind of AU. 
> 
> Still enjoy Alias to this day and wish there was more recent Irina/Jack fic! Such an iconic pair. If you're reading this - be inspired to go write some and post it!


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